INSTRUCTORS: Robert Baum and Ivy Schweitzer
WEEKLY LEARNING GOALS
- Students will learn about the transatlantic history of poetic expression about the importance of Black lives, the violence visited upon them, and use of language and art to expose and resist such violence
- Students will enter, through poetry, the experiences of Black bodies and specifically, the experience of racism over a range of time including our contemporary moment.
- Students will learn about the way that religious systems shape people’s understanding of their world and how sudden eruptions of racially motivated violence challenge religious beliefs and their ability to make the world understandable, predictable, and controllable.
- Students will analyze spirituals, sermons, and theological essays that attempt to understand the religious challenges posed by racial violence against black communities and individuals in South Africa and North America.
READINGS
(*tip: print out the reading, especially the poetry, so that you can “close read it,” that is, highlight or circle what you find important or confusing and generally interact with the text.)
- Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” (p. 18) “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” (pp. 73-75)
- digital first edition: http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/pwp/id/138
- “Letter to Samson Occom” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h19.html (Links to an external site.)
- Context: “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” but June Jordan. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178504
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: “Aunt Chloe’s Politics,” “Learning to Read” (pdf)
Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adKddL4_TWg
- Biography: http://uudb.org/articles/francesharper.html
- Walt Whitman: “I Sing the Body Electric,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174740
- and Commentary: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_9.html
- And runaway slave passages from SoM section 10 1855/91 http://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/section-10
- Langston Hughes “I, too, Sing America”
- http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-too-sing-america
- Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173467
- “Sympathy.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175756
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” from The Bean Eaters, 1960.
- http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/abronzevillemother.html
- “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till”
- http://allpoetry.com/The-Last-Quatrain-Of-The-Ballad-Of-Emmett-Till
- Both: http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Brooks.htm
- Click on the link “Emmett Till” on the bottom for background information.
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen (required text for course).
- Religious Texts:
- A sermon of Monas Buthelezi
- James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p. 22-45.
- Martin Luther King, “Eulogy for the Martyred Children” 1963
- James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, p. 1-29.